Comments on the extremism of socialist medicine in
Canada. This style of medicine amounts to rationing by delay or unavailability,
in place of rationing by cash.

Worth a scan.

“These problems are not unique to Canada - they characterize
all government-run health care systems.

“Consider the recent British controversy over a cancer patient
who tried to get an appointment with a specialist, only to have it canceled
- 48 times. More than 1 million Britons must wait for some type of care,
with 200,000 in line for longer than six months. In France, the supply
of doctors is so limited that during an August 2003 heat wave - when
many doctors were on vacation and hospitals were stretched beyond capacity
- 15,000 elderly citizens died. Across Europe, state-of-the-art drugs
aren't available. And so on.

“Single-payer systems - confronting dirty hospitals, long waiting
lists and substandard treatment - are starting to crack, however. Canadian
newspapers are filled with stories of people frustrated by long delays
for care. Many Canadians, determined to get the care they need, have
begun looking not to lotteries - but to markets.

“Dr. Jacques Chaoulli is at the center of this changing health
care scene. In the 1990s, he organized a private Quebec practice - patients
called him, he mad e house calls and then he directly billed his patients.
The local health board cried foul and began fining him. The legal status
of private practice in Canada remained murky, but billing patients,
rather than the government, was certainly illegal, and so was private
insurance.”

The Clown swans around in wellies pretending to care
about the current UK floods, but pretence is all
you’ll ever get from the Clown.

Individuals always pay. In this case, once more to
clear up the messes left by socialists.

Far better to learn and do it right the first time.

With a socialist government, it has to be done twice
or not done, as is the more likely. The socialist way is to steal ever
more taxes, to meddle, to be corrupt and mostly to do nothing effective;
then to whine interminably at the natural consequences.

Then look around for someone to blame.

And when local communities try to clear up the mess
caused by the incompetence of socialists, to put on wellies and prance
around trying to take credit for the local effort,while pretending to
‘care’.

The mess has been allowed to accumulate over more than
a decade. The mess has been directly caused by the Clown, by his incompetence,
by his lazy mindedness, by his stupidity.

The problems have been recognised, and nothing has
been done.

“ "We met Tony Blair in 2000," Roz recalled, "and
he personally promised us that there was money there for flood defences."

“It took a while for anything to be done, but eventually new
defences were built. What protection did the authorities deliver? A
2ft-high brick wall was built across gardens running down to the river.

“Last week the flood waters "oozed through the bricks like
tissue paper", said Russell, and then overwhelmed the wall.

“ "It took six years before anything happened and then
little more than six months after they finished building the flood defences
they proved
useless. I was absolutely devastated."
—
“Britain has a long history of floods - and of failing to act
on the "lessons learnt".

“After severe flooding in 2000 the government declared the devastation
"a wake up call" and John Prescott, then the environment secretary,
told parliament: "We must take practical action now."

“Since then there have been 25 reports from parliamentary committees
and official bodies on how to reduce risks. Little has been done.”
[Quoted from timesonline.co.uk]

“The GPs’ Workload Survey, the first such study for 15
years, has found that after the introduction of a new contract three
years ago, doctors
are working on average about 15% fewer hours. During the same period
pay has risen by nearly a quarter.

“The report is likely to generate a backlash among nurses, who
the study found are taking up much of the slack.

“Another finding is that almost one-third of GPs, who earn an
average of more than £100,000 a year, are working part-time.

“The public is becoming increasingly concerned that GPs have
received such large pay increases while many patients still struggle
to book advance appointments and are unable to consult a family doctor
out of hours.” [Quoted from timesonline.co.uk]

“SENIOR executives at the Environment Agency face new controversy
after it emerged last night that they received five-figure "performance
bonuses" shortly before the recent floods hit Britain.

“Baroness Young, the quango’s chief executive, got a bonus
of about £24,000 on top of her £163,000 salary. A further
eight executives, including the director of water management, shared
in the bonus handout last month. The average paid to each executive
was equivalent to 10% of their salaries, although Young received 15%.”
—
“Board minutes also show that the agency’s top executives
privately expressed strong concerns last September about the country’s
preparedness for serious floods.” [Quoted from timesonline.co.uk]

“The government's pledge to halt the soaring rate of childhood
obesity within three years in fact cannot be achieved until 2050, warns
a damning report commissioned by ministers to help them tackle the problem.

“The number of six- to 10-year-olds who become obese will keep
rising relentlessly until the late 2040s, with as many as half of all
primary school-age boys and one in five girls dangerously overweight
by 2050, according to the document.” [Quoted from observer.guardian.co.uk]

“There are many reasons why this country should have a referendum,
but underlying everything is the matter of trust. This is not something
politicians in any of the parties can afford to further undermine.

“One of Tony Blair's last acts was to renege on the promise of
a referendum and it is almost unbelievable that one of Gordon Brown's
first acts has been to do the same. There is still time for him to put
this right.” [Quoted from telegraph.co.uk]

The fools have just concentrated on lying and
spin, not only ruining the country’s infrastructure, but also undermining
the pension system.

The result of that sort of short-sighted behaviour
is now all around. Soon enough, the results of the raided pension schemes
will surface.

In the meanwhile, the unaware will go on supporting
the Clown for short-term imagined ‘benefits’, like their dole
payments stolen from others and the future.

The dole payments/bribes are the typical cost of socialism,
more long-term destruction, to buy votes now.

The result is less preparedness for the future, and
thereby a steadily lowered standard of living for the UK’s children.
These children are allowed, and even encouraged, to live in a dream world
with no understanding of reality or future.

Brown the Clown and his complicit population are spending
their children’s inheritance, destroying the future viability of
the country.

This way of living destroys the future. Doing that
is vastly more costly in the long run than fixing the problems while it
is still possible.

‘A stitch in time save nine’

Now, the UK community will have to pay far more for
this profligacy and stupidity than had action been taken long ago, while there
were still such options.

It is always the people that have to pay. The country
belongs to the people. Do the unaware suppose that the Saudis or the Chinese
will perhaps pay for them?

“The point of reviewing prior American naivete and cynicism is not to
excuse the real mistakes in stabilizing Iraq. Instead, these past
blunders remind us that we have had few good choices in dealing with
the terrorism, theocracy and authoritarian madness of an oil-rich
Middle East. And we have had none after the murder of 3,000 Americans
on September 11.”
—
“After four years of effort in Iraq, Americans may well tire of that
cost and bring Gen. Petraeus and the troops home. We can then go back
to the shorter-term remedies of the past. Well and good.

“But at least remember what that past policy was: Democratic
appeasement of terrorists, interrupted by cynical Republican business
with terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

“Then came September 11, and we determined to get tougher than the
Democrats by taking out the savage Taliban and Saddam Hussein — and
more principled than the Republicans by staying on after our victories
to foster something better.

“The jihadists are now fighting a desperate war against the new stick
of American military power and carrot of American-inspired political
reform. They want us, in defeat, to go back to turning a blind eye to
both terrorism and corrupt dictatorships.

“That's the only way they got power in the first place and now
desperately count on keeping it.”

Victor Hanson seems to be returning to his confident unapologetic self. I do wish
he’d stop getting his black moods.

He is one of the few media writers with a head that is both
informed and sane.

The Republican Party have their own moonbat wing: those
who only care about sex, abortion, sex, queers, more sex, drugs and yet
more sex. For months, this moonbat wing have been trying to orchestrate
an Anything-But-A-Serious-Candidate campaign. Their current empty-vessel
face is Fred Thompson.

Happily, Rudy Giuliani is increasingly making them
look ridiculous. There is no way that the moonbat’s vacuous sound-bites
can keep up:

“We should have started to move toward energy independence back
in the 1970s, when oil prices spiked and there were the long lines at
gas stations. Presidents Nixon and Carter talked about energy independence,
but not a lot got done. The next President of the United States is going
to have to make it a major goal of their administration. Most people
will say it's impossible, we've tried before. I'm running for president
because I know how to get things done.”
—
“Just like Brazil is ahead of us in ethanol, France is ahead of
us in nuclear power. Eighty percent of the electricity in France comes
from nuclear power. Only twenty percent of electricity in America is
generated by nuclear power and it's going to go down to fifteen percent
in the future if we don't do something about it. We invented the peaceful
use of nuclear power, but we've let other countries get ahead of us.
There is no reason for that. No one's ever died from nuclear power in
the United States. Despite that fact, we haven't licensed a new nuclear
power plant in the United States in 30 years.”
—
“The bottom line is that there is no one answer: Ethanol and bio-fuels
can't do it all, conservation can't do it all, coal, nuclear, wind,
solar, hybrid vehicles - none of these are silver bullet solutions.
But if we increase our use of each one of them to a higher level, we
can achieve energy independence in the future while creating a new engine
for the American economy.”

from our very special correspondent - the clown is to spend billions on id cards, cameras and more dole

Now, that spending’ll solve the real problems, says the Clown during a planning
meeting amongst his highly important people.

With ID cards, we will be able to trace those missing in floods.

With cameras, which will now be waterproofed, we can watch the
water flowing and rising.

With the extra dole, our base vote will be able to buy new subsidised
water wings.

We have even decided to give back a fifth of a billion pounds to the flood
defences budget in 2012.

This socialist Labour government is doing things for their great British
public.

“We have instructed our propaganda media to refer repeatedly to ‘the blame game’,” said the minister, “because we are not really to blame. We couldn’t have known it was going to rain; and anyway we wanted to spend on the Dome. We are allocating another £10 billion to the British Broadcasting leftist propaganda job creation scheme, in order to get the message out.

“The Home Secretary has ordered a new law be propagated, that nobody is allowed to complain.”

government, god, and flooding - as the jet stream moves north, the
clown ‘plans’ to build still more on the flood plains

The UK has a socialist government. That means inevitable
short-termism allied to constant, inefficient meddling. The meddler in
chief, Gordon Brown, has now captured the party machine.

His meddling government wishes to ‘plan’
all ‘development’, but it is keeping all useful data centralised
and secret. Further, the British government is refusing to educate the
public in any useful skills. Why doesn’t Jo Sixpack even know what
a flood plain is? It is hardly rocket science at that level.

“It found that the volume of water melting into the sea each
year from glaciers and ice caps was 100 cubic miles (417 cubic km),
which is almost equal in size to the amount of water in Lake Erie. However,
this volume of meltwater is increasing by a further three cubic miles
each year because of an acceleration in the rate at which ice
caps and glaciers are melting, said Professor Mark Meier, of the
University of Colorado. "One reason for doing this study is the
widely held view that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be
the principal cause of sea-level rise," Professor Meier said. "But
we show that it is the glaciers and ice caps, not the two large ice
sheets, that will be the big players in the sea rise for at least the
next few generations."

“The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that
melting ice caps and glaciers will add about three inches (7.6cm) to
sea levels this century. But the latest assessment, published in the
journal Science, suggests they are more likely to add between four inches
and 9.5 inches to global sea levels.

“This does not include the rise in sea levels caused by the thermal
expansion of water, which could potentially double this figure. A 12-inch
rise in sea level can typically cause a shoreline to retreat by 100ft
(30m) or more. About 100 million people now live in areas within three
feet of sea level.”
—
“Scientists at the British Antarctic Survey have found that the
movement of about 300 glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsular had accelerated
towards the sea. The scientists believe they were disintegrating at
a faster rate than before.” [Quoted from independent.co.uk]

A fairly technical indication of both the complexities
of measurement and the scale of current changes:

“Their study - based on tide gauge, GPS, gravity, and satellite
measurements - shows a general pattern of subsidence of 1-2mm a year.

“With waters rising in the region by about 1mm a year, the combined
effect is a 2-3mm a year rise in sea level with respect to the land.”
—
“ London itself will rock by 10mm, twice a day, with loading from
ocean tides. The seasons also alternately load and unload the ground,
making the Earth's crust "breathe" up and down over a longer
period.”
—
“ "Within the GPS data you have to model loading effects
and also account for atmospheric effects on the GPS signals. We have
done this and have not only reduced the errors, but we now understand
better what's in those error bars," explained Dr Norman Teferle
from the University of Nottingham.” [Quoted from bbc.co.uk]

Weather science has been warning of these problems
for decades. This is not an act of god. It is terrifying complacency,
corruption and lack of even basic planning, as the filthy
fossil fuel crunch closes in and the weather changes.

Housing stock, both in Britain and elsewhere, should
be built to far higher standards, not built for the short term by lazy
socialists and their jerry-building housing contractors. The British government
should not be not wasting tax money in preferential treatment to fund
their dole clients.

Labour’s socialist world will have to build on
stilts next.
The stumbling of Brown the clown would also look more appropriate as nonsense-on-stilts.

Doubtless a co-coordinated attack from Victoria Street
[Labour Party HQ].

“The airline [Ryanair] claimed that the government would make
more than £1bn from the air passenger duty increase and that Treasury
had no plans to invest any of the revenue into environmental programmes.”
—
“ The Advertising Standards Authority agreed with Ryanair's defence
ofthe £1bn figure based on HM Revenue and Customs figures.

“However, it ruled against the airline on two other claims. It
ruled that Ryanair was misleading over the 2% claim because it failed
to be clear about the basis of its claim, even though there was no agreed
method for attributing international flight emissions to specific countries

“The ad watchdog upheld the complaint against the claim that
"not a penny spent on the environment" because the government
had said that some revenues would go toward "environmental measures
and in increasing public transport". "

“The ASA says that Ryanair has been told not to repeat its claims
on carbon emissions and the government's lack of redistribution of air
passenger duty on climate-change initiatives.” [Quoted from adfero.co.uk]

Note that the big grey area on the left (Anbar) has in reality, if not officially, been largely turned over to the locals. This follows the highly successful turning of the tribes against Al-Qaeda and subsequent clearance operations - the model which is now being used in the rest of Iraq to similar effect.

Only an idiot, or someone with a vested interest in Western failure, would suggest that we are losing in Iraq. Now why is it that so many "Democrats" are trying to push an artificial failure? Are they just stupid, or do their interests lie with our enemies?

“[The security improvements] will [inform my thinking] because what I'm hearing now is a sea change that is taking place in many places here," he replied. "It's no longer a matter of pushing al-Qaida out of Ramadi, for example, but rather - now that they have been pushed out - helping the local police and the local army have a chance to get their feet on the ground and set up their systems.”

From UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

“But I'd like to tell you that a great caution should be taken for the sake of the Iraqi people," he said at a U.N. press conference. "Any abrupt withdrawal or decision may lead to a further deterioration.”

It looks like George Bush has got yet another fool/crook (Annan) replaced with a someone more reasonable.

“Oil ruled the 20th century; the shortage of oil will rule the 21st.
There is now no doubt about the rising trend in oil prices. In 2003 a
barrel of Brent crude sold for $29; in 2004 it rose to $38; in 2005 it
rose to $54.50; in 2006 it rose to $65. Last Friday the price closed
at $77.50. Some dealers expect it to test the $80 level quite shortly.

“Last Tuesday the lead story in The Financial Times was the latest
report from the International Energy Agency. The FT quoted the IEA as
saying: "Oil looks extremely tight in five years’ time," and that
there are "prospects of even tighter natural gas markets at the turn
of the decade". For an international agency, that is inflammatory
language. This steep rise in the oil price over a four-year period has
been caused by demand rising at more than 2 per cent a year, while
supplies had risen more slowly, by a healthy 4.1 per cent in 2004, but
by only 1.25 per cent in 2005 and 0.5 per cent in 2006.

“This has revived the "oil peak" debate among oil analysts. Some
analysts believe that the world will never again be able to pump as
much oil as we are pumping at present.

“Peter Warburton’s excellent weekly risk analysis has pointed out that
27 of the 51 oil-producing nations listed in BP’s Statistical Review
of World Energy reported output declines in 2006. One projection of
world crude oil production actually forecasts a 10 per cent reduction
in total world output between 2005 and 2015. That would be a
revolution.”

Meanwhile, the UK government runs scared. Britain is behind in conservation.
The North Sea oil is running down, and the politicians are scared mindless of doing what they must -
building UK nuclear power.

Britain runs down while Mandlebrot [Peter Mandelson], and Pillock [Neil Kinnock],
and now [Tony] Bliar look to the main chance.

and trying to thwart the USA intent to remove the mad murderer of Baghdad.

“Police searched the home of Dominique de Villepin, the former French
Prime Minister, yesterday as judges appeared close to charging him
with conspiring to implicate Nicolas Sarkozy, now the President, in a
corruption scandal. Criminal charges are thought likely after
examining judges unearthed new evidence that appears to put Mr de
Villepin, 56, close to the heart of the so-called Clearstream affair.

“The scandal, under investigation since 2005, involves forged bank
records that suggested falsely that Mr Sarkozy and other senior
figures had received big bribes in the sale of French warships to
Taiwan.

“Mr de Villepin was serving as Foreign and then Interior Minister and
Mr Sarkozy, his rival for the future presidency, was Finance, then
Interior Minister.

“The affair poisoned the already strained relations between Mr de
Villepin, the protégé of Mr Chirac, and the President’s mutinous
subordinate, who was intent on succeeding him.”

AP and other fossil media outlets write about ‘massacres’ when they are false enemy propaganda designed to sap the will of the Coalition of the Willing.

AP and other fossil media outlets refuse to write about real massacres carried out by their friends in Al Qaeda.

We have treason and sedition laws on the books. Why are they not enforced?

“This claimed massacre never happened, and was formally repudiated by the U.S. military on Saturday, June 30, who ascribed the claims to insurgent propaganda. To date, the Associated Press has refused to print a retraction or a correction for this false story, just as it has failed to print a retraction for previous false beheading stories.
—
“At the same time, the Associated Press has refused to run the story of a verified massacre in Iraq discovered on June 29 and supported by named sources, eyewitness statements, and photographic evidence provided by noted independent journalist Michael Yon in his dispatch, Bless the Beasts and Children.”

This is a useful article. However, the throwaway comment on
Churchill is unsourced and
unsupported, and the real level of the threat remains unenumerated.

“One can see those lessons being applied today. The security services have assiduously avoided a general clampdown on Muslim groups. Information from the public has been encouraged, but treated with caution. There have been serious mistakes, such as Forest Gate, but there is clearly a determined effort to avoid over- reaction: official pronouncements on the threat of Islamic extremism have been deliberately nuanced, and carefully measured.
—
“The response to home-grown British terror suggests that the security services are conscious of history, aware that the enemy within can only be fought with care, realism and reliable intelligence, not with propaganda or by feeding public paranoia. This goes some way to explaining why the anti-Muslim backlash has not happened.”

The following is my reponse to a correspondent who had taken this waffly article
seriously.

Of course ‘downturns’ are ‘possible’.
There’ll be a downturn if an asteroid hits Earth.

Nothing much in the future is “foreseeable”. If you want to “foresee”
the future, you may as well examine the entrails of a cockerel ritually slaughtered at dawn. Believing that you can foresee the future is a form of arrogant delusion.

And what are people to do instead, if they can decline to borrow or spend? Stuff their money in a shoe?

Supposing some people did not buy things. Will a refusal to buy ties bring down the world clothing industry? Why would it?

Keynes held that there was no natural rate of employment/unemployment.
His advice was for government to run projects to soak up ‘unemployment’. France has approximately 25% of
the population ‘employed’ by government. Britain had about 13% when last I looked. [See also citizen’s wage.]

Prior to Keynes was laissez-faire - that is, the market will correct itself. It is totally in error
to imagine Keynes was a socialist. He was anything but. This is just another area where socialists have attempted to
re-write history.

Socialist governments have attempted to target unemployment by generating inflation. And this idiocy is starting again with a ‘democrat’ congress.

“So far, though, Mr. Bernanke has been slow to pick up on the new tone
in Congress. In a May 17 speech, the chairman said the Fed is
"authorized" to write rules against abuses in lending.

“That brought a rebuke from Mr. Dodd: "The chairman misspoke. The law
requires the Federal Reserve to write rules to protect home
borrowers."

“Fed officials say they are trying to find the right long-term approach
that will preserve credit for needy borrowers. That doesn't satisfy
lawmakers.” [Quoted from
theglobeandmail.com]

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at
suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the
surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on
well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the
right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of
the note-bearing territory) there need be no more unemployment and,
with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community,
and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater
than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build
houses and the like; but as there are political and practical
difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than
nothing.”
General Theory (1936) bk. 3, ch. 10

Keynes however (correctly) hated inflation:

“Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning
the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The
process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of
destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is
able to diagnose.”
Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) ch. 6.

Keynes broke the nonsense of classical economics. The bullshit academies and the leftist media
are still engorged with the non-sense.

The ‘theory’ of depressions comes from that dismal idiocy. Serious economics is not
about pretty graphs.

You are being taught seriously deranged ‘logic’ in the establishment,
in the ‘universities’ it often leads to dangerously foolish actions. Keynes understood this.

“I evidently knew more about economics than my examiners.”
Explaining why he performed badly in the Civil Service examinations,
in Sir Roy Harrod Life of John Maynard Keynes (1951) ch. 3.

The problem is not that you don’t know sommat. The problem is that you know things
that ain’t so.

The job of government is not to ‘forecast’ the future. It is to deal with present
realities. The great depression in the 1930s ceased once governments grasped this fact.

Keynes was one of the very great minds of the twentieth century. The fact that he has been
followed by a cartload of foolish posturing monkeys is not the fault or responsibility of Keynes.

Alan Greenspan is one of the great minds of banking. Greenspan understands Keynes and he understands money. So did Keynes understand both money and reality.

It is foolish to confuse the real world with ‘theories’ from lightweights
and assorted dolts.

So we should first concentrate on the real world, not damned ‘theories’.

I repeat, how exactly might this alleged ‘crash’ manifest itself and play out?
Forget the damned theories and the dopey scribblers in the fossil media, forget Mystic Meg. It is necessary to first put feet
on the ground and then work it through.

So if you manage to put forward scenarios suggesting why there should be a ‘crash’,
then I will tell you what Keynes would advise or Greenspan would do - well, approximately.

The real world is complicated. It depends on the individual acts of billions. It doesn’t
depend on ‘theories’.

Keynes and Greenspan were/are great men because they concentrated on
and understood the real world.